The Singing Detective

The original Singing Detective, Dennis Potter’s 1986 BBC miniseries, was one of those bizarre and unrepeatable triumphs of pure creativity over the strictures of narrative form-a hallucinatory mix of noir film, paranoid fever dream, and Fosse-esque musical that built up and intertwined layers of story just so it could rip them apart and recombine them. Unrepeatable, and yet here’s this movie, which would seem to have no reason for being except that its translation from the small screen was Potter’s final project before his death from cancer in 1994. It’s challenging and strange material, and with a running time shorter than a quarter of the miniseries it also can’t possibly be as rich as the original. Indeed, it’s one of the year’s most critically divisive, loved by a few and hated by a few more, since its debut at Sundance last January. (Even so, it’s as uncontroversial as an episode of Friends compared to producer Mel Gibson’s upcoming The Passion of Christ.) We suspect that reviews are kind of superfluous with movies like this in any case; if you’re going, go with your mind open and your hopes medium-high, and know that the presence of Robert Downey Jr. in the lead can’t help being a positive.
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